Tuesday, November 30, 2010

daily painting - bonjour frenchie!

i love this french bulldog. what a happy compact little fellow. a great companion dog. (so i have read) kinda close in appearance to the american bulldog and much prettier than the english bulldog. in my opinion. i think i might like to own one. i like short hair too. we have a red doberman pincher. he is a lovely elegant and sensible dog - but you don't get a lot of personality or clowning from a dobie. they are serious and poker faced. when they disobey by eating out of the kitchen trashcan, you can hardly tell - they so gingerly pick at their food - they do thrash the trash. the only little telltale clues are a few crumbs around the trash can and on the dog's pokerfaced nose. aha! he knows when he has done a bad deed - he nearly punishes himself! all we need to do is give him the stare - the he hangs his head and sulks.
my daughter has a pitbull. he is named gracie. "gracie" because he is not graceful. when we were in charge of gracie, for about a year while my daughter was busy figuring out how to sneak the pit into her rental home without the landlord noticing, we couldn't bring ourselves to call him gracie - so we renamed him taz for tasmanian devil. it might seem wrong that we should rename her dog, but we weren't absolutely sure he was not going to be living with us permanently. it was hard for (especially my husband) to call out after gracie across a field of other dogs and owners when gracie clearly was a "he". my husband is a bit of a phoebe.
taz was a holy terror to the neighborhood too. we didn't decipline him as we were not sure if we should - we were merely the dog's grandparents afterall. he was a curious ball of muscle and he escaped frequently from our fenced yard. one time he chase after a woman walking her dog up the hill she started screaming and had to resort to standing on someone's car. it was a parked car. thank goodness. no harm done - just a ration of swear words directed at us. another time a man was walking his little minature something or other - he was a fancy dresser, he and his boyfriend. anyway, taz escaped and charged to the man and his dog - he only wated to play -but the man made such a loud fuss and threatened to call the police and whatnot that taz couldn't help himself (he liked excitement) and jumped all over that man and his white linen pants. taz had been playing in the mud. i really expected at least a laundry bill that time - but it never came - in fact i never saw those men and their minature again.
i have been speaking of taz in the past tense, but don't worry he is still very much alive and running around. albeit slower now. he just doesn't live with us. brooke finally determined to take her dog home no matter what her landlord said, and she decided it was high time to discipline him too. the dog not the landlord. although.........
anyway, gracie is now very well mannered, fatter and older. sortof like the rest of us. well, maybe not the manners part.